secret. Whether she was offended by the tardiness of my confession, or
whether she thought she had gone too far to retrace her steps, I know
not, but she remained implacable, and with cold and repulsive dignity
commanded me to rise, saying:
'So great a lady should never be found at any one's feet, and I offer
you a thousand apologies for my conduct toward you.'
I attempted to kiss her hand, but she withdrew it, and ended by saying
that her house was unworthy of a lady of my quality, of a princess
royal, of an independent duchess, of the future Queen of Poland. She
then made all the preparations necessary for my departure.
I retained strength enough to control my feelings, for which I thank
God: a momentary flash of anger did not cause me to forget so many
proofs of kindness and affection, and, with the docility of a girl of
sixteen, I prepared to depart, although I was entirely ignorant where I
should go to, or who would offer me protection and an asylum.... I
believe the word _Sulgostow_ was uttered either by myself or by the
princess. The valet who came to take the princess's orders during the
latter part of our conversation, mentioned throughout the mansion that I
was going to Sulgostow to pass the Christmas holidays.
Chance decided my fate, and, incapable of forming any resolution, I was
happy in permitting myself to be guided by others. Before I left, I
wrote a long letter to the prince royal, which I confided to the
princess. In less than two hours all my arrangements were made; I came
and went, I acted mechanically, without fixed thought or purpose; I was
finally placed in the carriage with my lady companion, and the horses
bore us rapidly away from Warsaw.
When I beheld the walls of Sulgostow, I began to think upon how I could
best acquaint my sister with these incredible events; but once in her
presence, my confusion was such that I lost the power of measuring my
words, and hence she fancied I had gone mad....
Now that all has been explained, we laugh together over this strange
mistake, but such laughter is only a momentary forgetfulness of my
position, and a passing truce to my torment. These first two days have
been most painful, for I have as yet heard nothing from the prince
royal. I cannot express my grief and my anguish; my health must be very
strong not to have suffered more from such torments.... At least, may I
not hope that my dreams of bliss will one day be realized?
THE GREAT STRUGGLE.
Is it true that 'our democratic institutions are now on trial?'
Everybody, or nearly everybody, says so. _The London Times_ says so, and
is or has been gloating over their failure. Many of our 'able editors'
say so, and are trying desperately to prove that they will not fail.
Thus, while there is a wide difference in opinion as to what may be the
result, there seems to be a quite general agreement as to the fact that
the trial is going on. There appears to be no suspicion that the
question is not properly stated. Doubtless the assertion will excite
surprise, if heeded at all, that in fact the great struggle here and now
is _not_ between aristocracy or despotism on the one hand, and democracy
on the other. Most people in the United States have come to entertain
the fixed idea that the only natural political antagonisms are
democratic as opposed to despotic in any and all shapes. And this idea
has become so ingrained in the American mind that it will be difficult
to gain credence for the assertion that the terms constitutionalism and
absolutism represent the forces or systems which, have really been
antagonistic ever since Christianity began to affect and animate social
and political relations.
It may be a new idea to many readers that absolutism can be democratic,
as well as aristocratic or autocratic. Yet such is the fact, and the
whole history of Greece and Rome proves it. Plato, the friend of the
people, taught the absolute power of the state--of the power holder,
whoever that might be, whether the people, the aristocracy, the
triumvirate, the archon, or the consul. It was not possible for Plato,
Demosthenes, or Cicero, to conceive the idea of constitutionalism.
Wherever the will of the power holder operates _directly_ upon the
subject or object, there is absolutism. Interpose a _medium_ between the
two, separate the law _maker_ from the law _executor_, make _both_ the
subjects or servants of the law, and then, if the people are virtuous,
you can harmonize private liberty with public order. The individual must
not be absorbed by the state; individual liberty must not be merged in
absolutism. Nor must the state go down before individualism.
The problem is to render possible and reconcile the coexistence of the
largest private liberty and the highest public authority. This implies
the idea of _mediation_. There must be _mediatizing_ institutions
standing between the state and the individual, insuring the safe
transmission of power, and guaranteeing justice between the state and
individuals, as well as between individuals in their relations with each
other. This done, you realize or actualize the grand idea of mediation
in the political relations of men. The distinguishing idea of
Christianity--the God-man reconciling man with God, and thus harmonizing
the finite with the infinite--this idea must actualize itself in the
affairs of men, in order to harmonize perfect liberty with salutary
authority. Animated by this idea, penetrated with profoundest belief of
the infinite worth of the individual man because the God-man had
wonderfully renewed his nature, the early Christian heroes and martyrs
took hold of the hostile and disorganized elements of European
society--the fragments of the Roman empire on the one hand, and the
barbarians of the north on the other--and brought order out of chaos.
They re-organized society by naturally, though slowly, developing those
numerous intermediary institutions--guilds, corporations, trial by jury,
the judiciary, and representation of interests, orders, guilds and
corporations, _not of individual heads_, in Parliament--all which, as a
living, harmonious system, constitute, or _did_ constitute, the English
Constitution, and were essentially reproduced in the Constitution of the
United States, and which wonderfully distinguish constitutionalism from
absolutism.
'The will of the emperor has the force of law,' was the fundamental
maxim of the civil law. Emperor, imperator;--hence, imperialism,
Cæsarism, absolutism. That maxim obtained with pagans--civilized it may
be, but none the less pagans--whose theory or gospel was that 'man is
his own end.' Man's infinite moral worth as man, was not known or not
recognized in the pagan civilization of the classic Greeks and Romans.
Hence the state, which outlived the individual, was of more importance
than the individual, and naturally absorbed the individual. Man being
his own end, and existence being next to impossible without society, the
state was the best means to obtain his end, and therefore Plato taught
that man lives for the state, must be trained up for the state, belongs
to the state, and is of no value outside of the state. Hence the pagan
civilization of Greece and Rome, being intensely human, while it became
very splendid and refined, became also, and could not help becoming
intensely and unutterably corrupt--so corrupt that St. Paul refrained
from finishing the disgusting catalogue of its awful sins and vices. The
church, Christianity, could save _man_, but it could not save the
_empire_. The principle of social harmony being lost, government and
society fell to pieces.
On a certain memorable occasion, the present Emperor of France uttered
the mystic phrase: _The empire is peace!_ So it is. But how? I answer:
Several centuries of Godless French statesmanship--engineered by men
who, though nominal Christians or Catholics, discarded God in affairs of
state, and attempted to rule without God in the world, except to use Him
(pardon the expression) as a sort of scarecrow for the 'lower
orders'--resulted in gradually drying up those intermediary institutions
which had served at once to develop a manly civic life and to protect
private liberty, and in reabsorbing and concentrating all power in the
central government. Even in the early part of these centuries, Louis the
Fourteenth made his boast, 'I am the state,' and thereby announced the
substantial reinauguration of pagan imperialism or absolutism. His
successors, aided by the ever-growing influence of the renaissance,
which was but the revivification of classic paganism, continued his
system, and when at last their cruel, inhuman, and unchristian
oppressions drove men to the assertion of their rights in the fierce
whirlwind of the French Revolution, that very assertion, 'clad in hell
fire,' as Carlyle says, was based on the self-same fundamental principle
that 'man is his own end.' The Revolution also ignored the divine idea,
and failed. The subsequent revolutions, and especially that of 1848,
were no wiser. The last was simply the triumph of democratic absolutism
by universal suffrage, in place of autocratic or monarchic absolutism,
as De Tocqueville clearly demonstrated in his 'Ancient Regime and the
Revolution.' De Tocqueville had thoroughly mastered the constitutional
system, as had also Lacordaire and Montalembert, and he, as well as
they, joined the so-called republican movement of 1848, hoping that
constitutionalism would triumph at last. But he soon saw that European
Democrats or Red Republicans did not comprehend the idea;--that, in
fact, they meant absolutism, though democratic; and he retired in
disappointment, though calm hopefulness, to his estate, and there wrote
his 'Ancient Regime.'
True, the Red Republicans issued high-sounding phrases about liberty,
rights of man, and the right of the people to govern. But they meant
rights of man independent of God, and the right of the people to be
absolute; and they continued the system of centralism, or government by
bureaucracy, without God. The French have learned by sad experience that
there is a thousand times more danger of change, turbulence, and
disruption, under democratic absolutism than under autocratic
absolutism. Louis Napoleon knows it well, and hence his significant
phrase, 'The empire is peace.' It is the strong iron band around a mass
of antagonistic atoms, which have lost, at least in the sphere of
politics, the cohesive principle of harmony: union with each other by
virtue of union with the God-man.
Through all the terrific scenes of turbulence and carnage, the frequent
dynastic changes, and the fearful scourgings of the French empire since
the days of Louis the Fourteenth, the nation itself has not been
destroyed, because, after all, there was and is a vast deal of virtue in
the people as individuals. God never destroyed a nation for its public
or national sins until the people themselves had become individually
thoroughly corrupt. The city of Sodom itself would have been spared had
even _five_ good men been found therein. And so the French nation does
not go to pieces, as the Roman empire did, because, notwithstanding the
vice of Paris, of which we hear and read so much, and the godlessness of
French statesmanship and French literature, the great body of the
people, even in Paris, still retain their integrity, and a wholesome
fear of God. But because their current literature is heathenish, and
their statesmanship has ignored honesty and the divine origin of man's
rights, those intermediary institutions, which were developed by
Christian charity from the idea that man's rights are sacred because
God-given and dignified by the God-man, have been undermined or
disanimated, and it has come to pass that the only government possible,
where the divine idea is eliminated from politics, is one in the form of
absolutism. How long this form will continue in France remains to be
seen. But it is certain that European Democrats or Red Republicans, with
their ideas--or rather lack of ideas--will never comprehend the
constitutional system, and will never rehabilitate or reanimate those
intermediary municipal institutions, the monuments of which De
Tocqueville was surprised to find scattered so generally through
continental Europe, as well as in England and in New England.
Turning, now, to the United States, it is plainly evident that the whole
tendency of our politics, intensely accelerated by the influence of
Jefferson's French views, has been, first, to lose out of mind the true
significance of those intermediary institutions embodied in the common
law of England, and inherited by us from the mother country; and,
secondly, to depreciate them as standing in the way of the people's
will, or popular sovereignty; and, lastly, to break them down entirely,
and substitute for them the tyranny of an irresponsible majority, or
democratic absolutism. The persistent efforts to get rid of grand juries
and trial by jury, to popularize the judiciary, to make senatorial terms
dependent on changing party majorities, to reduce the representative to
a mere deputy, and other similar schemes to bring about the direct
_unmediatized_ operation of the popular will upon the subject, are all
illustrations of this direful tendency.
Concurrently with, and greatly aiding this tendency, there has been a
gradual decay of the manly virtue that charactized our fathers. Men have
become less conscientious in the performance of their public duties, and
more regardless of private rights. A genuine manly self-respect implies
sincere respect for the rights of others, and both inevitably decay as
the fear of God dies out. When men continually act on the idea that man
is his own end, and when each one is intensely engaged in seeking his
own interest, what can result but jarring of interests, opposition,
repulsion, disregard of law in so far as it clashes with private ends,
and thus, finally, social and political disruption more or less
extensive? Thus our trouble lies deeper than slavery. Remove the canker
of slavery to-day, and yet the tendency to disruption and dissolution
would evermore go on while prevailing ideas actuated society. The
remorseless mill of selfishness would keep on grinding, grinding,
grinding toward dissolution. Look at our literature, our architecture,
our science, our political and moral theories, our social arrangements
generally, and especially our hideous, almost diabolical arrangements or
lack of arrangements for the care of the poor and the unfortunate, and
what a confused jumble they present! Having no grand animating idea, no
all-pervading principle of harmony, no universally recognized standard
for anything, we are necessarily the most anomalous, amorphous,
helter-skelter aggregation of independent and antagonistic
individualities ever gathered together since nations began to exist.
What can prevent such an agglomeration from falling to pieces? What can
hold it together?
Thus, with the frightful decay of Christian, and even manly
virtue--alas! too plainly visible all around us--and the entire
divorcement of morality or religious ideas from politics, what fate is
in store for us but the inevitable triumph of anarchy, and through it of
despotism? Herein lies our real danger. The great struggle is _not_, as
many assert, between aristocracy, or monarchy, or despotism and
democracy. But it is between despotism or absolutism and
constitutionalism. It is the struggle of the pagan system (revived by
the renaissance), based on the idea that 'man is his own end,' with the
Christian system based on the idea of mediation, involving the idea that
the true end of man is God. It is not true, therefore, that democratic
institutions are now on trial in the United States. Democracy, pure and
simple, precisely in the form it is assuming or has assumed in this
country, was tried long ago. It was tried in ancient Greece, and found
wanting. It was tried in Rome, and ended in the dissolution of the
empire. And in both these trials it had, to begin with, a much more
highly finished, fresh, robust, and whole-souled manhood to work with
and to work upon than that of modern democracy. More recently it was
tried in France, and for the present is blooming in the despotism of
Napoleon III.
The question, then, I repeat, is whether constitutionalism, as
originally developed in England and embodied and reproduced by our
fathers--who, perhaps, 'builded wiser than they knew'--can come safely
through this crisis and triumph over the two ideas which, thus far, have
predominated in the American mind, and driven us with fearful strides
toward absolutism. 'Every man for himself' is the first idea. In the
family, in church, in politics, in commerce, in all social and political
relations, every man striving, pushing, scrambling, straining every
nerve to advance himself, regardless of his neighbor or the public
interest--such everywhere is the confused and hideous picture of
American society. Selfishness predominates, and selfishness is
repellant. So it was before the ages were, when Lucifer, in the pride of
self, refused obedience to the Word. So it is even yet, and its
inevitable tendency is to hostile isolation and final dissolution. Its
logical consequence is anarchy. But anarchy is intolerable, and a
civilized people, yea, even barbarians, will submit to anything rather
than social and political chaos. Then comes the iron band of despotism
to hold together the antagonistic fragments.
'The supremacy of the people's will' is the second idea. _Vox Populi,
vox Dei!_ What the people decree is right, and nothing must stand
between their will and the subject or object upon which it operates!
Such is the political gospel according to democracy, and fifty years'
earnest proclamation thereof has wellnigh abolished all the barriers of
constitutionalism--barriers, which stood like faithful guardians, stern
but just, between the Individual and the State, which reconciled the
harmonious coexistence of private liberty and public power--an idea
wholly unknown in pagan or classic civilization--and which at once
prevented the anarchy of individualism and the tyranny of absolutism.
But true it is, whatever a people constantly assert they come to
believe, and whatever they believe will at last crystallize itself in
action. And thus, with the oft-repeated and ever-increasing assertion
that 'man is his own end,' and 'is sufficient unto himself,' and with
that other assertion that the will of the people is law and must act
directly upon its object, we have gradually lost out of mind the true
significance of the constitutional system. Those numberless intermediary
institutions--which logically _grew_ out of the Christian idea of
mediation, as the oak naturally grows out of the acorn, and which
wonderfully reconciled liberty with authority, freedom with order, the
finite with the infinite--have become more and more obsolete, and less
and less understood. They have crumbled away like the stately columns of
a magnificent but neglected cathedral. They have become dead branches
that must be lopped off. They are rubbish that must be removed--relics
of monarchy or aristocracy, cunningly devised inventions of priestcraft
or kingcraft, that retard the triumph of democracy.
If the will of the people is supreme, then away with your high and
life-long judges, or at least let them be elected by the people and for
very brief terms. Let grand juries be voted a humbug, and trial by jury
a nuisance. Let electoral colleges be abolished as meaningless and
cumbersome anomalies. Let the President be the direct representative of
a mighty people, and act without let or hindrance--only let him act with
gigantic energy and swift execution. Let senatorial terms be dependent
upon changing legislative majorities. In fact, let the two legislative
houses, as being wholly useless and very expensive, be reduced to one.
Let the representative be a tongue-bound deputy, and not a free, manly,
self-acting agent. Let county boards of supervisors give way to the one
man power of the county judge. And, in short, let us go on, as we have
been going on, democratizing or popularising our institutions,
'improving,' or rather impairing and tearing down one after another of
the venerable columns of the original system, until every safeguard of
personal freedom is removed, and there shall be nothing left to restrain
the giant sway of unmitigated and unmediatized public power. Then we
shall have despotism or absolutism, pure and simple--and none the less
so because it shall be democratic.
The London _Times_ will have nothing to jubilate over if what it
mistakenly calls our 'trial of democratic institutions' shall be
unsuccessful. For in fact, our constitutional system was but the
reproduction, in a broader field and on a grander scale, of the British
Constitution, in all its essential features, differing only in what
philosophic historians call 'accidentals.' And if that system finally
fails here, _The Times_ may have a 'most comfortable assurance' that it
will fail in England. True, we have more rapidly departed from and
defaced that system than the English, chiefly because, in escaping from
the fogs of England, we left behind us that stolid conservatism, that
bulldog tenacity for the old because it is old, which are instinctive in
the narrow-minded islanders. But they, just as much as we, have lost out
of mind the significance of the Christian idea. They, just as much as
we, have become thoroughly paganized--have become saturated with the
central idea of pagan civilization, that man is his own end, lives for
himself alone, and not for God, and therefore is inferior to and must be
the mere tool of the state. If Americans hold that the state can _make_
right, as well as enforce it, so do the English. If divine sanctions
have no longer any significance in America, so have they not in England.
If expediency, and not God's truth, is the universal rule of action
here, so is it there. If every American or 'Yankee' seeks his own end in
his own way, regardless of his neighbor, his Government, and his God, so
does every Englishman. The Englishman has no God except his belly or his
purse. Years ago it was said by one of themselves, 'The hell of the
English is--_not to make money_,' If the divine principle of charity is
a myth, and selfishness rages against selfishness here, much more so
with a people whose only God is Mammon. And finally, if inevitable
dissolution shall overtake us, and we rush into absolutism as a refuge
from anarchy, we shall have the melancholy pleasure--if it can be a
pleasure--of hailing the almost simultaneous wreck of the British
Constitution, whose noble ruins, no less than ours, would be mournful
monumental witnesses to the glory of ages wiser and better than our
own.
AMERICAN FINANCES AND RESOURCES.
LETTER NO. II, FROM HON. ROBERT J. WALKER.
LONDON, _10 Half Moon Street, Piccadilly_,
October 8, 1863.